


what a tool

by iimpavid



Series: a violent tongue for violent deeds [7]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Bad Elvish Translations, Character Study, Elvish Melodrama, Established Relationship, M/M, Mad Science, Organized Crime, Science Fiction, Vampires, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:54:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28456410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid
Summary: Their work was not strictly legal and more than a few of the extended family found themselves topping most-wanted lists among foreign governments for petty things like embezzlement, unethical scientific experimentation, war crimes, and a couple of preternatural disasters. Put another way: Celebrimbor's assortment of uncles, aunts, and cousins were as inventive as they were ruthless in pursuit of their ambitions.
Relationships: Celebrimbor | Telperinquar / Original Male Character
Series: a violent tongue for violent deeds [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1037535
Kudos: 2





	what a tool

**Author's Note:**

> "Ah, there he is,  
> that motherfucker.  
> What a tool."  
> \- "Him" by Bo Burnahm  
> (no one can prove that this isn't about Fëanor) 
> 
> Edited, reworked, and eventually expanded from an old fic. An old friend asked me to write him cyberpunk vampire-elves years ago but, since he doesn't talk to me any more, I think I have only myself to blame. 
> 
> As usual, both my Quenya and my lore knowledge are limited at best so suspend your disbelief. Tags will be added as this updates (assuming I ever finish it).

"It isn't that complicated. The soul is the metaphysical manifestation of the self, isn't it? And we know, from history, from prophecy, that it can be divorced from the body at length and be sent out to accomplish a great deal." 

Celebrimbor hadn't intended to sit in his grandfather's lab drinking into the wee hours but his own work had hit a wall somewhere around midnight. Maedhros' new prosthesis would write itself directly to his nervous system and be able to produce the same instinctive reflexes, twitches of discomfort, and sensations of pressure and broad scope of temperature as living flesh-- or as near to it as he could manage-- and all of it formed from a stunning latticework of truesilver stronger than girded steel... but only if he could finangle the neurobiological components just so. There was only so much that living nerve tissue was willing to do and grafts he'd tested on himself had, so far, been met with limited success.

Frustrated and too tired to do more good than harm, he'd given up and given in to Fëanor's offer of a late night drink. 

Celebrimbor's grandfather himself seldom indulged. Nor did he seem to tire at his work, whatever work it happened to be at any given time. Tonight, the great smith was elbow-deep in an android's chest cavity. The poor thing had been divorced from its limbs and cracked open like a particularly unlucky crustacean. It was a defective model, one of some dozens scavenged to feed Fëanor's newest research interest: the creation of light and life from the ever-still darkness of metal. It made for a better thought experiment than a reality but nothing had stopped Fëanor tinkering yet and Cel certainly wasn't going to be the one challenge him.

"All you'd have to do," he continued, gesturing a little sloppily, "is lead the soul to its new housing and convince it to stay. Everyone is unique, of course, so you'd have to have some kind of element that would speak directly to it, tempt it to stay--" 

Fëanor stopped prodding the motherboard on the table before him and watched Celebrimbor with the sharpness of obsidian. His pupils were open with the prospect of new ideas, like a cat that'd sighted prey, Celebrimbor thought.

"-- but I wouldn't know the first thing about it," he cut himself off, trying to laugh. "Too much liquor makes for an incoherent trail of thought."

Fëanor didn't so much as blink and his tone was inviting, "Follow it anyway." 

Celebrimbor tried. He raised his eyebrows and frowned and pulled a couple of other faces besides before deciding, "It can't be done. Not-- not with the tools we have on hand, inada," he amended quickly, seeing Fëanor's eyes narrow at the challenge. "The magic of it was forgotten aeons ago, certainly-- and you'd have to have a fëa, free of its hroa--" 

He stumbled over his thoughts but Fëanor was patient.

Celebrimbor chose his words as carefully as his muzzy brain would allow: "There are ways sung about-- I'm no loremaster-- you can breathe the fëa from a person, right. Old ways for healing before anesthetic-- more and less dangerous than anesthetic-- and I suppose that if you could manage to then contain it in some vessel." He shrugged, "A jewel would have to be forged to the purpose, the likes of which Arda hasn't known since Valinor, but it would probably break. A soul isn't like light or intent, it's too great a force... and you'd need something to anchor it to its new body, something the fëa would want greatly. But. If. If all of that could be done, then the rest would follow as simply as installing a new hard drive." 

He found the courage to look at his grandfather again. Fëanor had already returned to his work, dismantling the motherboard before him with practiced precision and without gloves. Despite the many, many hazards of handling razor-fine tools and the caustic chemicals powering android microsystems he seldom bothered with such precautions. His hands were scarred but hadn't faltered once in any work he set them to. It seemed now that he'd forgotten Celebrimbor was there, so intent he was in his thoughts. He had gone elsewhere.

The silence stretched into an itching ache until Celebrimbor couldn't stand it any more. "You can't be thinking of-- to do such a thing is impossible. There are too many variables to account for. And if it were possible, it isn't right!" 

Fëanor smiled down at the android and when he looked back to his grandson it seemed his eyes were lit with a blue flame. "Isn't it past time you went home and went to bed?" 

"I'm not a child," Celebrimbor's laugh was uneasy.

"Of course not. Nonetheless, you need your rest. If you mean to restore my son, you won't do any better sleep deprived and hungover." 

"Has anyone told you it's rude to always be right?" 

* * *

The lab complex was some ten stories below ground in the bones of a dwarven mining venture. The company had gone under a century ago and been abandoned ever since. Most floors stood vacant and most-likely haunted, if not by spirits then certainly by squatters, but the Fëanorion family had taken a few levels for themselves out of a deeply held interested in security. Their work was not strictly legal and more than a few of the extended family found themselves topping most-wanted lists among foreign governments for petty things like embezzlement, unethical scientific experimentation, war crimes, and a couple of preternatural disasters. Put another way: Celebrimbor's assortment of uncles, aunts, and cousins were as inventive as they were ruthless in pursuit of their ambitions.

He emerged at the ground level from an elevator that was indistinguishable from the graffitied and cracked wall it was set into. A clever array of filtered projection grains set into the concrete saw to that. Just outside the elevator, a little to the right, the roof of the building had collapsed to let in all manner of new-growing moss and plants, small vermin and moonlight. Tonight, it let in the rain, too, drizzling into streams across the uneven and filthy tile.

Celebrimbor was satisfied to splash through the water.

It suited his mood, he thought, the rain. The euphoria of drunken theorizing had settled into an uneasy sickness. He hoped it was only nerves and that he wouldn't actually vomit. He surely hadn't drunk as much as all that? 

In the East the storm clouds were dark and deep but, to a trained eye, they were lightening just a little. It was lucky that he'd stayed so late: the first bus of the morning would reach the outskirts of the city in half an hour. He only had to walk the mile to the nearest stop.

* * *

The signpost demarcating the bus stop was bent at a jaunty angle. Celebrimbor leaned a hip against it despite the fact that doing so let the rainwater drip down the back of his leather jacket. He made a note on the haltha set into his palm to _purchase a jacket with a hood, aesthetics be damned_. Or maybe a scarf. 

He stared at his hasty scrawl on the augmented reality of his hand for a full minute, feeling the wet spreading from his collar over his shoulders and making his shirt stick to his skin in the worst ways. He thought about biting his nails. The beds were still bloody, though, from his last bout of nervousness.

That made up his mind for him. He pressed a fingertip into the hinge of his jaw, just before his ear, and waited for the line to connect.

Installing the arabeth last month had been a useful bit of experimental self-surgery, maybe the best idea he'd had to date. Yes, it had been painful and difficult to lay wire finer than spiders’ filaments beneath his skin running from his motor cortex and temporal lobe all the way to the ends of his fingers. Yes, he would have a scar on his scalp, behind his ear and along his the coronal suture on the left side of his skull, for the rest of his life. But it let him keep Vorondië on hand at a moment's notice-- assuming he wasn't too busy for a call.

Vorondië didn’t pick up. Celebrimbor chewed the inside of his lip and dialed again.

As the bus pulled up to the stop and the ramp descended the line finally connected. 

" _Yeah_?" 

It wasn’t uncommon for Vorondië to sound so contrary to his name: impatient and annoyed no matter who he was talking to.

Celebrimbor blinked stupidly into the middle distance, caught up in the sudden inability to walk and talk at the same time. Lucky him, the bus was automated. There was neither a driver nor passengers there to find fault with his dithering.

"I don't know if my grandfather knows the year any more-- or that he ever did," is the non sequitur he settled upon as he boarded. There was more fumbling: wallet chain, wallet, bus pass. The bus's onramp slid quietly into place behind him with a soft hiss.

"The way he talks sometimes, it's like he thinks," he wavers over the right words, "like this is Valinor and he can do whatever strikes him as interesting without consequence. I've never actually talked to anyone who knew him then who wasn't family. I'm starting to think he made it all up. You know my family: vouching for him is the least of what they'd do for him." 

He chose to stand near the rear exit. Sitting would make him more aware of the water down the back of his jacket and soaking further thanks to his hair. This was what he got for wearing it long, braided or not. 

From the other end of the line there's a sound of shifting, the sound of something solid hitting a body. Vorondië asks, "What'd he do?"

"It's not that he's done anything," Celebrimbor amends. "It's just... he has this tendency to fixate. Which is useful!" He caught himself from back-peddling too much. His grandfather had built their lives and businesses from the ground up, enabling all of them to live in relative comfort, and the advances to sciences of all kinds their family line was responsible for were a boon to the world, certainly-- "But there has to be a line somewhere. Do you know what I mean?" 

He made himself take a breath with a small prayer of thanks that he was alone on the bus, then. "And, by the way, good morning. I didn't mean to do this. Again. But it's been a long day. Night. Morning?"

"It's morning, Cel, it's like 4 a.m., actually. I thought you were gonna be home way earlier than this?" 

There came a broken, animal sort of keening sound and Celebrimbor elected to ignore it. "I know. It's just that we got to talking-- you know how we get when we have an idea-- and he hasn't done anything but it's like with children. It's when they're quiet and not committing crimes against life is that you need to be the most worried about what they're up to." He cringed. He sounded like his uncles, all of them, and that said very little that was good about his grandfather. "I might be a little drunk," he added, hoping to excuse the breadth of his paranoia, to make it seem less.

The bus's floor-to-ceiling exterior display revealed the city rapidly materializing around him. It made some people seasick and there was an option to shut it off but to Celebrimbor the constant movement, the sensation of floating ungrounded through space, was comforting. From the shanties, the bus jettisoned through the defunct industrial districts and Celebrimbor wondered if that was where Vorondië was working there tonight.

Soon, he would find himself in the heart of Eregion with its layers upon layers of life; the lowest districts dipping to stories below ground-level, steel and glass woven and patched together with greenery, bottom-lit train trestles lacing delicate patterns through the city's forest-body.

That was how he thought of it, anyway, a complex and intricate beauty on par with old-growth rainforests in the North. Less-kind assessments compared it to a termite mound.

"I'm sure its nothing," he continues, "Grandfather just wants to find some way to harness a living soul and bind it to inorganic matter." There came the nausea again. "But the thing is... The thing is I think I know how to do it in theory and there's no one better at putting theory into practice than Fëanor because he has no idea what his own limits are-- and it's like i said, it's nothing. I'm a little drunk and nothing bad has happened I just--" 

The bus drew to a slow stop and he stepped into the organized chaos of the station. Bodies traversed numbered and color-coded routs on the floor to connections and exists. Celebrimbor followed along a while exit line that spit him out at an elevator some 50 stories above and a few blocks West of his apartment.

"I just need sleep and I wanted to hear you tell me so, that's all," he says, sounding resolved.

Vorondië clicked his tongue, disapproving. "Be honest; your thrice-damned grandfather's plaguing you again." 

Celebrimbor sighed and shifted from foot to foot in the elevator.

Other passengers looked at him askance. 

He knew, objectively, that this was the direct result of the glow of arabeth wiring beneath his skin: a glittering spiderweb down his jaw and neck that wandered into the pitch black of his hair and wrapped even the cartilage of his ear. It was a technology that'd made great waves for its innovation-- and its illegality. (A few ugly side effects like seizures, cognitive dissolution, and distorted spatial perception had made for great scandal... but Celebrimbor thought it was stupid to outlaw something so useful when problems only arose from either incompetent biomedical engineering or unlucky genes. He, himself, was the victim of neither.) But, still, he saw them looking and he stood there in the elevator blushing because his traitorous brain could only fixate on Vorondië's tone and the fact that people were seeing Celebrimbor being scolded.

"I've told you. Not in so many words, maybe, but I have told you," he insisted, risking sounding petulant. "He might kill someone. Again. Possibly several someone in the hope of creating an abomination for no apparent reason except perhaps to prove to himself and everyone else that he can. And ... I'm afraid of what it means if he succeeds. Not to mention the fact that I seem to have given him the idea in the first place--" He rubs his fingers into his temple; his hangover is already starting. "I should have just come home earlier, you're right." 

"I'm not around to be right, you know," his typical annoyance takes on a gentler tone, "I'm not on the phone with you to be right. I don't _like_ being right-- I just worry about you. And I hate your family."

The declaration, as common as "I love you" might be from any other lover, makes Celebrimbor laugh. 

"I know, I know, I'm sorry."

On second though, it might be the conversation about murder earning him suspicious glances from strangers. Celebrimbor's glad for the elbow room it gets him, though, and all but flees the elevator before the doors have even finished opening. We're not all that bad, you know, it's just most of us," he adds with mild humor. His love for his family was great but not wholly unconditional, a fact that he bore with great discomfort and a hefty ration of guilt.

He'd reached the point of not-quite-dry that was humid and miserable. He restrained himself, barely, from pulling his hair out of its braid and wringing it out right there in the middle of the street. If he did not so love the jacket Vorondie had given him last equinox, he'd give serious thought to leaving it behind and freeing himself from the overwarm, smothering feeling. 

"If he decides to do something," there's a pregnant pause here, a fill-in-the-blank option for an appropriately reprehensible adjective, and Celebrimbor can picture Vorondië's gesture of frustration, "then that's his problem. You don't have an augur to his head. He's gonna find ways to do what he wants to do whether you help him or not." 

The causeway was just beginning to overcrowd with the morning commute of foot traffic and Celebrimbor walked at a fast clip, slipping between those too slow for him to hop onto the riling dividing the lanes of pedestrians. The congestion was just too much for him. This was not the done thing but it was a faster way to get around for the fleet of foot. What Celebrimbor wouldn't give to be able to teleport home. That would be his next project, he decided. Quantum physics wasn't to his taste but no one else was making the kinds of progress with transportation that he wanted to see. Perhaps Durin or Narvi would have ideas about a starting point.

"Vorondië," he sighed, overwhelmed and weary and full of the kind of love that did not rest but never found itself tired, "You know that's now how these things work. Neither legally nor morally nor subjectively within the family when psuh comes to shove and someone must be held accountable for inspiring grandfather's unique brand of insanity-- because he, himself, is beyond reproach. I would that I knew better to be taken in by him but I can't seem to manage that." 

"Maybe you should let me do you that favor everyone's been begging for the last millenium," he murmured. (To his mind it would be no great loss to the world if Fëanor died; Celebrimbor's brilliance more than made up for it.)

There came a high popping sound over the line, the ringing of a suppressor, then the sounds of a body being dragged over concrete. Vorondië is working, after all. 

Celebrimbor made a noise somewhere between a sigh and a groan. "No. Because you know as well as I do that it would only escalate and I don't relish the thought of burying you." 

"Go home, meleth-nin. Don't let your grandfather worry you; he isn't worth it. Besides, I'll be home soon. You can tell me everything else when I get home." 

"I don't think I'll be any more coherent but I'll see if I can't stay awake until you get here." It still pleased Celebrimbor to no end how easily he'd taken to calling Celebrimbor's apartment "home". How easy it'd been to clear out a drawer and then half the closet and to get his palm coded to the lock on the apartment door. "Be safe getting here," he added.

There came the soft hum of a hovercycle starting up, its ozone engine turning over with smooth, low clangor. "You know me, Cel, safety is my middle name."

**Author's Note:**

> I have no explanation for myself but if you wanted to comment you'd probably make my day.


End file.
